Cora Brown's Garbage Can

This is a list of some of the items in Cora Brown’s trashcan.

1. A small stack of unopened greeting cards in multicolored envelopes. If you were to open them, they would read much the same: “My condolences” or “In your time of loss” etc. etc., followed by hand-written messages full of hollow assertions such as “She is in a better place now,” etc. etc. Cora knows that they are all the same, all similarly empty—it has taken her this three weeks since it happened to make up her mind. If she had thrown them away two weeks earlier, it might have been a vindictive kind of toss. She might have thought, “Fuck all of you,” and thrown them out with relish. But today, she was able to simply throw them away. She congratulates herself. Congratulations, Cora.

2. Five empty cigarette packs. Her family might be appalled if they knew that she has taken up smoking—at least, she assumes that this is the case. What she doesn’t know is that her youngest daughter Rebekah, the one with the quiet owlish eyes, knows that Cora has been smoking since one week after it happened—this was when Johnny and the children had started back at work and school but Cora remained at home, sitting on the front porch and gazing out over the lawn. Rebekah had found the ashtray out on the porch, and dumped it out in the trash before her father, her brother, or even Cora herself could notice that it was there. She had not told anyone about what she knew, and she had been helping her mother to hide the habit without her knowledge for the last two weeks. Cora will not be smoking for much longer now.

3. Plastic pie packages, instant rice box, plastic forks and knives, frozen casserole pans, and used paper towels. Cora usually does the grocery shopping, and had she been the one to go the last time, she might have bought the same kinds of quick fix-ups that her husband picked, but the difference is that had she done this herself, it would have felt like admitting defeat—it would have seemed too symbolic for her to bear. Johnny knew that she would feel guilty for not cooking her usual elaborate meals, and so he had thought it best to go ahead and buy all those things and take the resulting verbal chastisement like a man, and pretend that he had just gotten confused at the grocery store and bought the wrong things, just like a man. Congratulations, Johnny.

4. Empty cans of cat food. Cora’s friend Ruby gave her a Siamese kitten two days ago. Presently, she is fretting over it, feeding it too much, and laughing too loudly at its antics, as if to make her voice rise up over something that suffocates her. The Browns had fallen in love with the kitten immediately, desperately, and the soft thumps that its little feet make on the floor echo through the big house, punctuating the solemnity of the hours and minutes with moments of weightlessness. In fact, you don’t want to imagine what it would feel like to be in that house without a kitten right now. Good form, Ruby.

5. Wine bottles. Cora has always been a wine drinker, and she usually shows impeccable taste in her selections. Lately, however, she buys the largest bottles at the grocery store. These things happen when a hobby becomes a necessity.

6. Therapeutic hand-exercise ball. When it happened, Cora thought she couldn’t bear to part with anything that Ann Elizabeth had ever touched. For some number of days, this became her routine: she would go into the empty room and lie down on the empty bed, clutching some stuffed toy or article of clothing to her body, and weep torrentially into the pillow that still smelled like baby shampoo and the stale residue of exhaled breath. A few weeks later, though, she realized that it would not be fair to horde so many costly physical therapy accoutrements that less fortunate families needed for their own children. Just yesterday she dropped off most of the larger equipment at the hospital. But the little hand ball was different. It was the only one she could neither keep nor give away, because it had been Ann E.’s favorite object, the one thing that she used to keep in her hand for most of the day and sometimes even while she was asleep. Cora had been sleeping with it too. But this morning, Johnny saw her wake up and look at the ball for a few moments. Then she swung her legs over the side of the bed and padded into the kitchen on her bare feet. He had heard the crunch of papers in the bottom of the trash can, then Cora came back without the ball, slid between the sheets, and backed herself into the cave of her husband’s body.

7. A half-used package of maxi pads. When it happened, Ann E. had just turned sixteen. For the last three years, Cora and Rebekah had been developing a system for dealing with Ann E.’s menstrual cycle. By now, they had it down to a science—they could have written a dissertation on how two small women can lift a third body as big as each of their own to change a maxi pad, where to place the pad in the underpants of a wheelchair-bound girl so that it would not leak, and all the other considerations that no one anticipates before they are asked to come up with solutions for such things. Cora threw the pads away because she has already passed menopause—“Praise the Lord!” is all she has to say about that—and her remaining daughter is too young yet to need them.

8. A wedding invitation. Two days after her daughter’s funeral, Cora’s neice, who lives in the apartment upstairs, announced her engagement to her boyfriend. “…would like to announce the union of Dan Alphonse Carlson and Abigail Marie Brown…” Cora has done an excellent job hiding her disgust at this monumentally ungraceful gesture. Good job, Cora.

9. A set of floral-patterned curtains. Cora Brown decided this morning that some things are going to change. Starting with those hideous curtains in the bathroom.